blonde poker forum

Little bit strange as I've heard of fun loving players with a lot of money before...

I might even seem like it myself the amount I can get 'in for' sometimes.

But we will introduce player z - he is the single biggest 'whale' I have ever seen, met, had the pleasure of both meeting, talking to and learning to deal with.

And

Player y - he is a younger player, with a deep stack he has gotten by peeling pairs oop in bad spots and flopping or turning baby triplets.  He is on the 'tighter' side postflop but has been caught a little ool in recent times


They're both well into their second day in the room, possibly verging on a 3rd.


We have played pretty snug all session with only one 'bluff', which was vs these two.
A call, call, raise river on J10227 with A9.
Turns out y has yet again cc oop with a weak hand and now has the 89 were trying to rep, z has the donked mighty 82 for another 'top of range hand' and our one bluff does not get through.

Since then we have value bet vs Z a lot, somehow not getting it all on 885hh 4ss 10  with my 108 vs 86
:( he ckb turn....

So, weve adjusted by isolating Z with atc that can play well IP vs him and have 3 players on our left doing 0 about it.

[X] going well so far



THE HAND
Im effective with 550.  Z has 2k, Y covers.

Utg+1 open Jh 9h to 16 over straddle

Y calls IP and Z calls oop.

Kh 8h 6c

donk 31 from Z (this has been J5o to K8 - he does it a LOT), we call, Y calls.
our plan will be to isolate Z on good turns, never expect aggression even when he has K8. (Flatted second nutz twice so far)
This 'should' put Y in a tough spot, most raises commit us on good turns... expect him to fold bare Kx ott some %.


TURN
5s

donk 63 (literally still atc, we've called down with A high and been good, a few times), we raise to 140 with 310 behind.

Y pretty quickly calls... (figure this is combo draw a lot, sometimes 66, Kx)
Z also calls.... (not unusual but not makes him probably paired.. - could genuinely be 22 tho - he bet/called aiott earlier with KQ vs 99 on 79106.....

RIVER
Ks

check from Z, we check and Y bets 240.

we fold......


thoughts ott?
River action for us on A, Q, J, 9, and complete bricks -2c???

What were you planning to do on the turn if you got jammed on?

Not sure i like your line with J high and a potentially dead fd

It's the kinda spot where the nfd is exponentially better than your holding

Is this ten handed?

Fold pre ne1?

Fold turn also

you need to reread the paragraphs above:

- ive been getting to showdown vs player Z with A and Q high and been good... often.

folding pre is never an option.

folding turn with what is possibly still the best hand vs one player and knowing player Y is tighter but he is also going to give up more than he should IP vs the two of us.


fold vs any reraises from Z, he never takes aggression back postflop without nuts.

snap get in vs Y with 310 behind, 850ish in pot with his jam and a range of only AK, sets, 2p, pair+st+fd hands....
(Haven't stoved that range so don't know how well it plays - but Y wouldn't have Axhh here and raise.


only reason A9hh would be better here is the A high will be good vs Z most of the time but a good J high will only be good some %
Y can have Axhh hands but that's only a small weighting of his continuing range ott.

Part of raising the turn is to get Y to make his hand faceup... I believe he folds most of his draws and only sometimes jams his big hands, but that I take most of his one pair range out by raising Z's donk bet.

you think these fish fold their draws?



need full hh of the a9 please.

It's K865

How is jack high ever the best hand here and why is that ever in your thoughts

It's not as if you're going to check it back for it's showdown value so that's completely irrelevant

Tighten up and stop getting in these bloated pots and uncomfortable spots regardless of how weak the table is. Don't need to win every pot regardless if you have a 27 card nut flush wrap that bricked on the river

The pot is 3 ways and you have jack high quite likely drawing to 3 outs

Raise calling either player for stacks on turn is obviously a losing play - giving up your equity r/f
Check folding all rivers that aren't a 7 or a heart as you won't get enough folds and no other rivers are good cards to bluff 3 ways


Hope I've read this all right


Sit in some games with our friend KR and copy what he does and see how he has a variance free 50 hourly this year in games up to 1/3 without ever getting into spots like this.

JB, this is such a bad turn raise. If it was an all-in bet then fine, provided you consider you have some fold equity (unlikely considering you think the first player will call with 22!). But it is not an all-in raise, there is still room for one fairly large 3bet jam. And if you get jammed on you have just created a horrible spot for yourself. You either have to fold a hand with substantial equity against the jammer's range (having put a large amount of money in yet failing to see the river), or you have to call the all-in with Jack high. Neither of these are good situations.

You can play around with pokerstove and create various villain ranges, and I'm sure you can find ranges against which you are 'priced in' to call the jam. However, being just priced in to call (i.e. you are fairly indifferent to calling or folding) is pretty much the worst possible thing that can ever happen to you during a poker hand. If you have a 'break even call' you have lost the pot. I explained this to you a while back.

If you want to have a raising range on the turn then it should be a polarised range consisting of extremely high equity hands (which will happily call a jam) and extremely low equity hands (which will happily fold to a jam). Raising a mid-equity hand like this is bad poker, both in a theoretical and a practical sense.

* shakes head*

(I'm drunk, that's all I can manage jb)

But seriously your thinking in this hand is way off!

This post is an absolutely prime example of making your reasoning suit your argument the other way round.

You say that the parts of his range Axhh, Qxhh, and infact any Q or A high hand are not big enough to worry about Axhh being a better hand for you to have, yet you think you're often winning with Jack high on k865. Which of these two things do you genuinely think are more likely? (I'll give you a clue, if you think it's the second one, you're wrong)

And also, exactly what hands can J9 possibly be beating? I don't even mean what 'reasonable' hands are you beating... I mean that J9 is hardly beating any pure random hands. 72, 73, 43, 42, 32 and T9 are the only hands out of all possible hands that you are beating with J9.

Full Tilt Poker Game #32716476107: Table Swiftly Tilting (6 max) - NL Hold'em - $1/$2 - 00:52:03 CET - 2013/05/26 [18:52:03 ET - 2013/05/25]
Seats: 6
Seat 1: mue17 ($364.35)
Seat 2: mr_bigx ($298.75)
Seat 3: MaverickSantos ($517.60)
Seat 4: carmarkozg ($200)
Seat 5: Somyung Sim ($251.90)
Seat 6: pads1161 ($267.95)
mr_bigx posts the small blind of $1
MaverickSantos posts the big blind of $2
The button is in seat #1
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to pads1161 [Jh Jc]
carmarkozg folds
Somyung Sim folds
pads1161 has 8 seconds left to act
pads1161 raises to $6
mue17 has 15 seconds left to act
mue17 raises to $18
mr_bigx folds
MaverickSantos folds
pads1161 calls $12
*** FLOP *** [td 3d 9d] (Total Pot: $39, 2 Players)
pads1161 checks
mue17 has 15 seconds left to act
mue17 has requested TIME
mue17 bets $33
pads1161 folds
Uncalled bet of $33 returned to mue17
mue17 mucks
mue17 wins the pot ($37.05)
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $39 | Rake $1.95
Board: [td 3d 9d]
Seat 1: mue17 (button) collected ($37.05), mucked
Seat 2: mr_bigx (small blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 3: MaverickSantos (big blind) folded before the Flop
Seat 4: carmarkozg didn't bet (folded)
Seat 5: Somyung Sim didn't bet (folded)
Seat 6: pads1161 folded on the Flop

look at this hand and take something from it mate.

Just seeing the name Swiftly Tilting brings back so many happy memories from my grinding days. It is a genius name for a Rush Poker incubator.

lol this is v true.

Just call the turn for reasons given, this raise size is a total trainwreck, because as you've played it I think you have to play guessing games vs turn re-raise and I think you're veyr nearly at a point where you have to shove the river, 310 back and 580 in the pot with the range you're now repping and the price you're getting on a river jam it's pretty close....

Obviously, shoving the river is gross because you're losing the pot AT LEAST half the time, I think it'd be a bad play to shove the river here, but I think raising the turn and not shoving the river COULD WELL BE EVEN WORSE...

Does that make sense?

Pads makes a gd point with the JJ hand, I remember on that live stream I played a hand where I just called a raise in the BB with TT and chk/snap folded KJ7 vs Walster's 24cc , just think how the hand is going to play out and if trouble seems iminent then just bailing is often the best way. Sometimes deep stacked you just have to let people have the pots, even when you have hands that are very likely to be favorite over the opposition range - I'd like folding the turn here way way more than what you did.

Jamming the turn might have some merit but I worry you're against the wrong players.

My first thought was that it reminded me a little of this hand  (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/87/high-stakes-mtt/bizarro-hand-vs-cornellfiji-bellagio-5k-257008/) - takes a while to get interesting, after like 50 or 60 posts where CF says what he has and his thought process.


Can you explain this concept please?

In a bit more detail:

You don't have to play this hand preflop. I believe we make half as many straights as a pure connector and we get coolered by higher flushes sometimes where we want to be doing the coolering. I don't think I would play it more than like a quarter of the time and that's when I've been card-dead and quiet for hours (so bored and want to play hands, and have a tight enough image that I can get away with opening a suited 1-gapper in EP).

Flop call is fine, but the turn I'm afraid reeks of FBS - fancy bluff syndrome. I'm very familiar with it myself - it's a cognitive bias where you seek information that increases the likelihood of your opponents folding and discount information that suggests they have good hands. That might come in the form of made-up live reads, or a hand that you remember playing against them a few months ago, or reading something into his bet-sizing where he's not even thinking that deeply about it himself.

While selling a hand isn't as important against people who can't handread particularly well, you're still representing exactly 79 here; a 79 that may not open pre, that may not even call the flop unless it came with hearts, and when it has hearts it often raises the flop. Instead you look like a weak Kx with possibly the x of hearts. You're trying to get two guys to fold, one of whom has shown a propensity not to fold ever.

My main attempt in this post is trying to shine some light in your head to the idea that it's very easy to try to justify the thing that you like to do (fancy play, big bluffs etc) by looking for things that back you up and not looking for things that don't. Once you realise this, it becomes easier (though not painless) to recognise this in yourself after the fact, but it's still very difficult to internalise and avoid in the middle of hands. But it is necessary.

The "theoretical aim" in a poker hand is to present your opponent with a decision which leaves him in-capable of making an obviously good play, in affect leave him guessing, he way well stumble into the right decision for that one specific spot on that instance, but as he didn't know what the correct play was, its safe to assume that if you gave him the spot 1000 times he'd be making a LOT of "bad" decisions (for that vacuum)

If for example he has a situation where one decision breaks even for him, and another loses then it is, by theory, impossible foe him to win this hand - irrespective of the results the person who has laid the decision has "won"

Spose you;re in a spot vs me where the EV of a call is 0, and the EV of a fold is -£50, lets say 99 times out of 100 you call, but 1 time you fold, the EV of that spot for me is +£0.50p and the EV for you is -£0.50p - even the hands where you break even I'm still making 50p.

It seems I have explained this concept to about ten different people over the last month. And I am surprised at how many people don't get it, and don't realise that being put in a spot where you have a break even call is a disaster.

Imagine there is £100 in the pot. I set you in for £100. You know that the equity of your hand against my jamming range is exactly 33.33% and so you are 'getting the right price' (2 to 1) to make a break even call. When this happens you have lost the pot, regardless of whether you call and (this time) win.

You are indifferent to calling or folding. The EV of folding = £0. The EV of calling = £0. But there is £100 in the pot! If your EV is £0 (no matter what you do) and there is £100 in the pot, then my EV = £100. Which means I have won the pot. And thus you have lost the pot.

If you can ever make your opponent indifferent to calling or folding then you have won the hand. And if you are ever put in a spot where your opponent has made you indifferent to calling or folding then you have lost the hand. Simple as that. Zero sum game.

The EV of folding is ALWAYS £0. It is the EV of calling which can sometimes be a negative number.

Obviously this is true in theory, however practise is a little bit different because of the ev of future decisions too. I'm 100% sure that you will agree that many people handle variance poorly,. Say I know you have QQ, and I have AK, if I call your 5bet and win, you hit monster tilt and lose X; If I lose, I reload with the same temperament. Current decisions have affects on future actions and ev.

I know and play with someone who tilts so hard after the first two allins, that it becomes essential to never double him up early. In fact, stack him twice in an hour and the fireworks begin.

Of course, Implied tilt odds can be factored into every decision. But that's not really relevant to the point I was making.

The majority of players don't realise just how bad it is to be made indifferent to calling or folding. They think "I'll bet this as a semibluff, and it is fine if he jams on me since I will be just about getting the right price to call it off". This is such bad thinking and completely misunderstands the maths of what actually happens when you have 'just the right price' to make a break even call.

The correct thought process is this: "I will semi-bluff with my hand because I think my opponent will fold a decent chunk of the time. And when he chooses not to fold, I suspect he will usually call rather than jam all-in. However, I am making this semi-bluff whilst fully aware that the times he does jam all-in are a nightmare for me, even though I will just have enough equity vs his range to call given the price I will be getting"

Post more please. (pm coming post scoop)

You have given this as an example of an 'indifference point' when in fact it is not. If you 4bet AK and I jam then flip over QQ then you are not indifferent between calling and folding. You have a very profitable call given the overlay from the pot.

Stacks and overlay were coincidentally at the point of indifference no matter how bizarre. :P

1000 big blind stacks you mean?

There, I bit ;)

As regards whether we should call or fold when facing a jam that we are indifferent to calling or folding versus if opponent has balanced his range correctly... GT says we should call with a frequency that prevents opponent profitably jamming the lowest equity parts of his range. However, obviously we may choose to embrace variance and make as many zero EV calls as possible in order to create extra chances of stacking an opponent who is prone to tilt.

Personally I dont like this raise ott as if z or y call then what are you going to do otr when you miss? 3 betting ott then cf the river is never a good play IMO so i just feel as though this is not the right line to take for this hand...